Started programming with 16, started to love it when I wrote the code to run my lab automatically (adjust the lasers, pump the vacuum chamber, run the electron gun, calibrate the spectrometers and do the measurements), while I was downtown having a beer with my friends. Did it in ansii c on a eltec os 9 lab computer using a camac crate.
Maybe I drop a word about why.
CS was an option for me, but I would have done it only to learn more about programming (and maybe how the hardware works). Since I already knew a lot about programming when I was 18, I decided to go for physics, because Astronomy and Quantum physics were both also strong interest of mine.
Basically this decision opened a bunch of very interesting job opportunities in science programming that would have been hard to get into without a scientific degree. I can wholeheartedly recommend to not study CS, but a different science, especially if you know that you want to write software. You can easily learn programming by yourself and get detailed knowledge in another topic. This combination is hard to beat (most scientists are very bad at programming).
It was a lot of fun to program in my own lab environment. Maybe because I controlled the whole pipeline starting from requirements to finally using the software for my own scientific work.
Its a pity that this is rare. Currently I develop software for an ESA space observatory. Sounds incredibly cool, but sucks a lot because of the size of these scientific projects (and because of the bureaucracy of ESA and NASA).
How rare is this? The caliber of mind required for physics should be more than enough to make a decent programmer. What's preventing your colleagues from just picking up what they need to know?
Still in college for CS but plan to complete course work on part-time, I've been programming since I was 14 professionally. (A friend of my father had an SEO startup and needed a script kiddie for PERL/JS/HTML stack. He bought me any book I wanted and payed 15/hour. Purely self-taught, but higher level mathematics and discrete theory have improved my programming beyond anything else I've taken.)
Computers are made for making life easier, and in a capitalism that equates to making money if you can teach a computer to do a human job. Just waiting for that dynamite concept to take to market.
When I stopped going to school full-time (about 2 years ago) I thought that I would continue my degree part time. It hasn't really worked out however. The reason I stopped going full time is that classes were boring, and since I work full time, wasting a couple of nights per week on boring classes (instead of staying at home hacking) is not something I enjoyed. I'm still "planning" to finish at some point in time but I'm starting to doubt if it will ever happen.
Maybe half of a theater degree? I completely failed out of college, then tried to make a living as an "artist," then accidentally stumbled into a programming job at a start-up. Now I'm a principal software engineer.
Absolutely. I'm very involved as an organizer & I still do workshops, etc. I make maybe $500 a year off of the work I do as an artist, which is great, but also clearly demonstrates why programming is the more prosperous carer path. Fortunately, I really, really enjoy programming & I've been able to use it to benefit the arts community I work with.
I'm glad to hear that you are able to contribute both your programming and artistic (and probably leadership) skills. My brother-in-law is a photographer and he's started to sell some of his photographs at small art fairs.
I've always wanted to be able to sit in a busy city park and either do caricatures or play classical guitar and draw a crowd to a stop and make a moment of their day more beautiful.. But it takes practice and practice. Not a priority, just a pipe-dream right now.
I'm starting to get involved with a non-profit - PHP stuff - I think it's better than stuffing envelopes (e.g. provide value with your skills)
Made it 1.5 years into an aerospace engineering program before realizing I was wasting my time and money. I was making six-figures and had racked up tons of hands on experience working with startups and Fortune 500s by the time my classmates walked out with a piece of paper and some huge debts.
Too boring, especially macroeconomics. It was quite clear early on that they had absolutely no idea how things actually worked in the real world, and were just dreaming up theories.
I'm not a programmer, but I'm learning. It's so hard to get good programmers that I thought I would learn how.
The trouble with business school is that some students mistake the classes for... well, for anything other than an opportunity to network. If you want to learn about finance, work for a fucking bank! If you want to make contacts, you could do a lot worse than a top MBA program.
An EE friend of mine (who helped me survive PChem, since I taught myself linear algebra and multivariate calculus, poorly) went back for his MBA recently. He began a standard engineering exposition of market forces in terms of structural equations and nearly the entire class glazed over. Afterwards, the professor (a former physicist) told him that, while his math was spot on, you can't use calculus in front of businesspeople and expect them to follow.
He almost cried. I laffed when he told me about this. (We both worked at JGSM and also at the supercomputing center as undergraduates -- even still, I think he was disappointed.)
Scientific programmers (what I was trained as) and everyday build-something-that-works programmers (which is more fun) are as different as FORTRAN77 and Lisp. Just an observation (related to your final sentence), not a tautology. There is, however, a divide between systems/performance-centric programming and logic-centric or symbolic programming, and the latter is more efficient in terms of man-hours IMHO.
There is definitely a difference, and my goal is not to become a scientific programmer - I'm not smart enough for that. I am just curious as to how it all works, and my goal is primarily to better understand the process. So it is just basic CSS, javascript and PHP.
B.A., CS, 2000. A prestigious US university you've heard of.
Essentially had to self-teach myself programming after graduation, because all they taught was Java and C++ and Windows NT. Real programming is a totally different mindset.
You can't be in this business without being passionate about it. Well...I guess you can, but I think everyone on this site falls into the 'passionate' category. And with that comes the ability to pick things up on your own, which is in any case pretty much a necessity for this field, as many aspects of it change frequently.
One of the wonderful things about this field is how much is possible to do on your own, if you have a computer a decent internet connection.
"I became interested in writing cell phone applications several years ago, after a rainy day high in the Italian Dolomites near Cortina d'Ampezzo - my old phone ended up in a mud puddle and died, leading me to purchase a new phone with J2ME (Java) capabilities. Writing applications in Java was okay, but I thought to myself that it would be an interesting experiment to try and create a scripting language that runs on top of the J2ME (now known as Java Micro Edition or Java ME) environment."
I had one formal course in software: Motorola 68k assembly language programming, in college. Three months of super-tedious review for the slow students ("this is a hexadecimal number") followed by perhaps one month of interesting new knowledge ("this is a stack frame"). I never tried to learn programming from a lecture course again.
I self-taught my own way through ArsDigita's web programming curriculum in the late 1990s... reading Greenspun's stuff was what convinced me that software was actually worth doing, and the reading list was great: SICP, Learning Emacs, Fogel's CVS book (hey, that's all they had in the elder days... :), Internetworking with TCP/IP, SQL for Smarties, Tufte, etc.
PhD in Mathematics (computational physics), 1997. Self-taught at programming from age 14. After finishing my PhD I decided to get out of academia. Didn't want to work as a "quant", hence: software (mainly programming).
MBA,
BA, Economics
BA, French
Université de Montpellier, France
International Interpreter's School Mons, Belgium
Started coding at about 8 or 9 years old on a C64 and Apple IIc/IIe. I have always been a tinkerer of sorts... taking things apart then wondering why I have extra parts left over when I put it back together.
I have done it all, networking, development, support, QA, moving up the food chain so to speak. These days, I spend a lot of time in Project/Process management.
No degree. I've been programming professionally for 20+ years. Usually better off than my peers salary-wise (since the beginning). Generally regarded as the best amongst the programmers I know personally (which is a bad thing, in my view). Started several companies. Most failed. One sold. Have had a 9-5 job for the last 3 years (telecommuting from home). Title: Senior Programmer Analyst. Actual Work: developing new products (programming).
I dropped out of college after my freshman year to join a startup. I've been doing programming and general IT work ever since (~8 years).
After taking some more classes part-time, I've probably got about 1/2 the requirements for a degree in mathematics from a couple of different schools, but never seem to find the time to go back full-time and finish it out.
I do work at the college I dropped out of all those years, ago, though.
So at Waterloo you can now get a BCS (in the math dept, school of comp sci), BMath - CS, Comp Eng, or Software Eng.
I think the diversity in the programs is a good thing. Hell half the Electrical Engineers end up as programmers, but I would never hire one :P
B.S., M.Eng. C.S. Texas A&M University. Programming for the man (but working on a little bit of just about everything on my own at home). Really. Desparately trying to figure out how to get going with a startup without having to go to the freaking Valley, Boston, or NYC.
Desperately trying to figure out how to get going with a startup without having to go to the freaking Valley, Boston, or NYC.
You can do it, if you can find a good cofounder where you are. When people like me talk about it being a net win to be in the Valley, we mean no more than that. It gives you an advantage. But it's far less important than the quality of your cofounder(s).
BA in communications from the University of Arizona - minor in CS.
They were restricting the students going into the major and I flubbed up the first semester. (I got a D in discrete math. None of the concepts were difficult for me, but they combined it as a proof class and I just couldn't get the hang of them.) Also, I knew I was pretty good with the computers, it was the interaction with people I was lacking.
I'm strongly considering going back for a Ph.D in cognitive science, but I'll likely have to shore up some of my undergraduate weaknesses first. (The years in industry have taught me that as much as I am frustrated with academia, it suits my personality much better.)
B.A. in Art and Photography. I was working in the mail room of a financial company here in Chicago when word got around that I was an art major and that I was into computers. The CIO came over one day and dropped a 4" stack of HTML print outs on my lap, asking me to build a company newsletter website. I haven't stopped web development since. (I can't believe that's pushing 10 years ago).
I dropped out of grad school (computer science) a few years back after completing 1 year only because it wasn't enjoyable. It felt like high school, no enthusiasm, like every HAD to be there. Classes were painfully slow and sequential, stripped of any creativity.
I've been coding since the age of 8, never got a degree as I found university moved too slowly. I knew from childhood that all I wanted to do was code. Now I've been coding professionally for 13 years, and overall for 27 years. I'd thought about going back for formal education but the reality of it is that I still learn at a faster rate on my own and do take the time and effort to learn even those things that I don't think I'll need or particularly care to learn. I do feel that I missed out on some camaraderie with peers, though I have since gained that via professional and non-professional venues.
BA Mathematics, concentration in Comp. Sci. from University of Rochester. Graduated a year before they had an undergrad Comp. Sci. degree--there was already a graduate program. Oh, yeah: I'm a programmer.
I went to a college in Canada, which are basically regarded as the "lower form" of post secondary, as Universities are for the big wigs.
I graduated from a 3 year Computer Programmer / Systems Analyst program and couldn't be happier. Now working at a retail startup doing all their tech / web/internal development / online / offline marketing and I couldn't be happier
Apart from that I stick in some freelance and my own projects on the side. Currently working on my own startup. I live code, I loves it
So to the initial question: No major degree, but I can code!
I have a degree in Civil Engineering. Since I was bored/nearly falling asleep in some of my structural engineering classes, I knew it probably wasn't the field. (I've always loved coding/playing with computers).
An engineering degree really emphasizes problem solving. We had homework sets where you'd be lucky to solve all of them. Spending hours on a single problem. But you learn a lot. I see software development mainly as creative problem-solving.
Getting my first job was a combination of luck and persistence.
I'm a current undergrad at University of Michigan, AA studying mechanical engineering. But, I started programming at 11 when I first got paid for my programming skills. I've worked in the "real world" each summer and have found my hacking abilities more useful than many other skills.
Sometimes it's a php script to scrape data, other times it is a vb macro to make excel work more efficiently or a bash script, etc. etc.
no degree, quit when I was told I couldn't take the fun (math, chem, etc) classes and had to take poly sci
code part-time, not as good as I'd like. Thinking about going back to school and finishing a CS degree, but I'm 40 with 5 kids to support (geeks get lovin too)
PS: You might want to warn someone if they have cookies turned off... the error message is counterintuitive.
BS Material Science - Rice
Took no comp sci in school, but I've been coding since I was 8 (Drawing Mr. T in VB)
Currently work as a coder, never used the degree
but..
co-workers who do my same job without a degree pull 20k less a year and are career limited (in that they can't advance anymore until they get a degree of some kind)
No degree. Taught myself how to code when I was kid. Started a Computer Engineering degree, but I would get bored and stopped going to class. Switched to Econ, but never finished that. Started taking classes I wanted in an order and grouping that was never going to get me a degree. So I left. I've been a programmer ever since.
BA English, UC San Diego
BA Math, UC Santa Cruz (strange case, they let me finish the double English/Math major at a different university - I did about half of the Math at UCSD and the other half at UCSC)
MS Industrial Engineering and Operations Research - UC Berkeley
Kind of boring by comparison: B.S. Computer Science, Gonzaga University. Working on my Masters thesis in Philosophy to be done in May. Been working continuously as a programmer (mostly legacy support) since January of 2006, with a few other internships before that.
High school dropout who has been a programmer for about 7 years now. Voracious reading habits on a wide variety of subjects, a willingness to work hard along with a constant assessment of knowing what I don't know has served me well.
No degree, but 990 GRE in maths, and 3 top 200 scores on the Putnam. First programmed in '63, unless you count wiring a Brainiac, which I did some years earlier. Finally getting around to studying Lisp <(+ grin groan)>.
MS in Industrial and System Engineering (thesis in Systems) from Ohio University. Learned programming as a mix of self-study, and great mentoring by a professor at OU.
Bachelors in Production Engineering from Bombay, India.
I'm currently on a break from school while I move and get settled with a new job (software developer at a near-Silicon Valley startup). I'm going back this fall to work on my BS in Comp Sci at CSU Fresno.
BS Math CMU, MA Math UPenn. Both too long ago to matter anymore. A programmer and failed mathematician. On good days, a software developer. Never a computer scientist or software engineer.
B.S. in Management with a concentration in MIS from the University at Buffalo. Transfered out of comp sci from the University of Delaware (I was bored and had no pretty girls in my classes).
I graduate this summer. I've got only 12 credits left out of 204 for my dual BS in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. I go to Kettering University (formerly General Motors Institute).
Engineering degree in civil engineering. self taught programming while in college and switched to full time programming career after a year stint has a civil engineer on the field.
Working on my degree now. Two more years to completion, suposing I ever attend the classes. I live in Brazil so the name of the University is probably meaningless to you all.
Generic Information Systems from Villa Julie College in Maryland. The courses taught me Visual Basic and SQL. I've taught myself everything else and have so much to learn.
BA in Computer Science from a tiny liberal arts college. I worked as a programmer for 3 years. now I'm back in school, working on a PhD in the biomedical sciences at BCM.
BS on CS (Concentration: Machine Learning and Computational Logic) from GA Tech. Currently working as a Python (30%) and Lisp (70%) programmer for a startup.
I'm about to graduate from Babson with a degree in entrepreneurship (real useful that's gonna be), and I'm working at a startup as a programmer (self-taught).
MS, Computer Applications (National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India) Manager of a Development Team. still like to call myself database programmer
M.S. from Norwegian School of Business Administration and Economics (NHH), M.A. in linguistics, University of Oslo, currently programming CL in a telco.
B.Sc (Computer Science) and an incomplete B.A (Philosophy/Classics). University of Canterbury here in New Zealand. Currently programming for my startup.
I decided not to go to college and instead work 100% on my startup. Life has been good. I can work with PHP if you want to consider that programming...
no degree for me. i started programming in my early teens with vb, worked for an isp during high school doing unix sysadmin and perl/php programming. after high school i didn't bother with college and just continued at the isp for a number of years doing perl/php/ruby programming. i left there two years ago to become self-employed doing software development.
bs math Pomona College,
ms statistics, ms,phd computer science U Wisc -Madison
Am a programmer; love what I do.
6-word novel describing my life:
"It worked! Still can't believe it."
I actually did a 4.5 year program for Master's and Undergrad there, so I don't have the typical experience.
I liked the program, I definitely learned a lot from it, although I can't honestly say I've used it much in my career (ended up lower level than UI often times).
My only gripe is that I wish that (at least at CMU) they had taught more graphic design. We had a few classes, but they were quite basic (I took as many as I could, but ultimately the interesting ones were restricted to Design majors).
Before you go get a Master's -- think about which part of HCI are you most interested in? Usability (evaluating, running tests), UI design, the programming?
Another Canuck here! I did my graduate diploma (1 yr) at SFU
I did my undergrad at Canadian Bible College - B.A. in Religious studies (with Music History and ancient Greek). Thought the subject matter doesn't help coding, I think the college work did. I'm also a "started at age 8" story.
Well, I often think I should go back to school. But I guess I've been lucky so far :)
That said, I think self-learning is much more important. They don't teach you how to use version-control, right?
Started programming with 16, started to love it when I wrote the code to run my lab automatically (adjust the lasers, pump the vacuum chamber, run the electron gun, calibrate the spectrometers and do the measurements), while I was downtown having a beer with my friends. Did it in ansii c on a eltec os 9 lab computer using a camac crate.
I still had to type the thesis myself.